Uprooted Palestinians are at the heart of the conflict in the M.E Palestinians uprooted by force of arms. Yet faced immense difficulties have survived, kept alive their history and culture, passed keys of family homes in occupied Palestine from one generation to the next.

Putin played the New World Order game long enough to climb as high as the position of President – then he abruptly turned his back on them, prompting Jacob Rothschild to accuse him of being a “traitor to the New World Order.”

Brave Vladimir Putin has banned Jacob Rothschild and his New World Order banking cartel family from entering Russian territory “under any circumstances.”

Putin recently reminded his cabinet that he paid off the Rothschild’s debt and “grabbed them by the scruff of the neck and kicked them out Russia’s back door.”

This meeting featured the President pounding his fist on the table and vowing to destroy the New World Order, and according to a Kremlin source Putin is making great strides towards this goal.

“They do not own the world, and they do not have carte blanch to do whatever they want. If we do not challenge them there will be other issues. We will not be bullied by them.”

It is understood that the Rothschild banking racket was a noose tied around the neck of the Russian economy. Once the knot was tightened, the economy would struggle and choke.

When pressed on whether he believed the assistance was purely humanitarian, Halevy responds, “I didn’t say there’s no tactical [consideration]. I said the main consideration, the immediate consideration is humane.”

Halevy also says he would not support the treatment of wounded Hezbollah fighters because Israel had been targeted by Hezbollah, but “not specifically targeted by al-Qaeda”.

Watch more from Mehdi Hasan’s interview with Efraim Halevy in which they discuss Israeli politics, the peace process and Halevy’s time in the Mossad

On June 2, a few days before the California primary, Hillary Clinton gave up trying to compete with Bernie Sanders on domestic policy. Instead, she zeroed in on the soft target of Donald Trump’s most “bizarre rants” in order to present herself as experienced and reasonable. Evidently taking her Democratic Party nomination for granted, she is positioning herself as the perfect candidate for hawkish Republicans.

Choosing to speak in San Diego, home base of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, on a platform draped with 19 American flags and preceded by half an hour of military marching music, Hillary Clinton was certain of finding a friendly audience for her celebration of American “strength”, “values” and “exceptionalism”. Cheered on by a military audience, Hillary was already assuming the role to which she most ardently aspires: that of Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces.

Whenever Hillary speaks, one must look for the lies. The biggest lies in this speech were lies of omission. No mention of her support for the invasion of Iraq, no mention of the disaster she wrought in Libya, no mention of her contribution to pursuing endless death and destruction in the Middle East.

But she also lied in claiming partial credit for the Iran nuclear deal, which she had tended to block, and most profoundly in presenting herself as a champion of diplomacy. As Secretary of State, she blocked diplomacy that would have prevented or ended conflict, most notoriously concerning Libya, where even senior U.S. military officers were told to cut off their contacts with Gaddafi agents seeking a peaceful compromise.

The Washington Post reported prior to the speech that her campaign “hopes there are many more national-security-minded Republicans and independents who would vote for her, even grudgingly, rather than see Trump win the White House.”

The Washington Post noted that the state of California’s “defense industry and military bases lend a backdrop for her speech.” Indeed! Hillary Clinton is quite simply catering to the military-industrial complex, as she has been doing throughout her career. She is catering to the arms industry, which needs to keep the American people scared of various “threats” in order to continue draining the nation’s wealth into their profitable enterprises. She needs the support of military men and women who believe in all those threats invented by intellectuals in think tanks and editorial offices.

This is the core of the “national-security-minded” electorate that Hillary is targeting. She warned that Trump would jeopardize the wonderful bipartisan foreign policy that has been keeping us great and safe for decades.

In reality, such “national-security-minded” leaders as Dick Cheney and Clinton herself have led the United States into wars that create chaos, inspire enemies and endanger everybody’s national security. Despite the geographically safe position of the United States, it is that bipartisan War Party that has created genuine threats to U.S. national security by prodding the hornets’ nest of religious fanaticism in the Middle East and provoking nuclear-armed Russia by aggressive military exercises right up to its borders.

The basis of Hillary Clinton’s world view is that notorious “American exceptionalism” which Obama has also celebrated. If we don’t rule the world, she suggested, “others will rush in to fill the vacuum”. She clearly cannot conceive of dealing respectfully with other nations. The United States, she proclaimed, is “exceptional – the last best hope on earth.”

Not all people on earth feel that way. So they must be brought to heel. In practice, this “exceptionalism” means acting above the law. It means a unipolar world policed by U.S. armed forces. In practice, Hillary’s devotion to “our allies” means fighting wars in the Middle East for the benefit of Israel and of Saudi Arabia, whose arms purchases are indispensable for our military industrial complex. It means bombing countries and overthrowing foreign governments, from Honduras to Syria and beyond, in order to help them conform to “our values”.

Trump is groping clumsily, at times idiotically, toward a major shift in US foreign policy. He is ill-prepared for the task. If ever elected, he would have to fire the neocons and take on a whole new team of experts to educate and guide him. That would be something of a miracle.

But some of Hillary’s reproaches aimed at Trump’s “reckless, risky” foreign policy statements are not as self-evident as she assumes. For example, his statement that he would sit down to negotiate with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Is that really such a crazy idea?

North Korea is a small country, whose leaders call themselves “communist” but who are essentially a dynasty that emerged from the resistance against Japanese invaders in World War II. Their quarrel with South Korea stemmed from the domination of Japanese collaborators in that part of the country. That is practically ancient history, and today North Korea feels threatened – and is indeed threatened – by the everlasting U.S. military presence on its borders. A small isolated country like North Korea is not a real “threat” to the world. Even with nuclear weapons. Its much-vaunted nuclear weapons are clearly meant both to defend itself from attack and as a bargaining chip.

So would it be so terrible to sit down and find out what the bargain might be? Basically, North Korean leaders would like to make a deal to lessen the U.S. threat and bring their country out of isolation. Why not discuss this, since it could lead to the end of the “North Korean threat” which is artificial anyway?

Hillary’s reaction is typical. She boasts that her solution is to build up an expensive missile defense shield in Japan and increase everybody’s military buildup in the region. As usual, she goes for the military solution, ridiculing the notion of diplomacy.

Hillary Clinton’s speech will certainly sound convincing to the “national security minded” because it is so familiar. The same as George W. Bush but delivered with much greater polish. America is good, America is great, we must remain strong to save the world. This is the road to disaster.

Russia denied there is a secret deal with the United States on anti-terrorism operation in Syria, as it regretted that Ankara has not made necessary steps to med ties with Moscow.

Russian presidential press officer Dmitry Peskov said Russia and the US continue exchanging information on the situation in Syria, but they are not coordinating their anti-terrorist activities.

“Unfortunately, we can state that there is still no cooperation in the anti-terrorist operation in Syria. But information exchange with our American partners takes place twice a day via relevant channels, and President Putin spoke about that,” Peskov told reporters on Thursday.

Responding to a question as to whether there is some secret agreement on cooperation between Russia and the U.S. on Syria, Peskov said: “No.”

Peskov reiterated that Russia is participating in the anti-terrorist operation in Syria at the request of the Syrian administration.
“Our military are not working in Iraq,” he said.

Earlier on Wednesday, Peskov regretted that Turkey has not taken the necessary steps to mend ties damaged by Ankara’s shooting down of a Russian warplane near the Syrian border last year.

The Kremlin was still waiting for Turkey to apologize and to pay compensation for the incident, Peskov told reporters when asked to comment on remarks by Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan who said on Tuesday he did not understand what kind of a “first step” Moscow expected from Ankara.

Hillary Clinton made a strong case for why handing the nuclear codes over to a President Donald Trump would be a scary idea, but there may be equal or even greater reason to fear turning them over to her. In perhaps the most likely area where nuclear war could break out – along Russia’s borders – Clinton comes across as the more belligerent of the two.

In Clinton’s world view, President Vladimir Putin, who has been elected multiple times and has approval ratings around 80 percent, is nothing more than a “dictator” who is engaged in “aggression” that threatens NATO following the U.S.-backed “regime change” in Ukraine.

“Moscow has taken aggressive military action in Ukraine, right on NATO’s doorstep,” she declared. But stop for a second and think about what Clinton said: she sees Russia responding to an unconstitutional coup in Ukraine – which installed a virulently anti-Russian regime on Russia’s border – as Moscow acting aggressively “on NATO’s doorstep.”

That’s the same NATO, whose job it was to protect Western Europe from the Soviet Union, that — following the Soviet Union’s collapse — added country after country right up to Russia’s border. In other words, NATO muscled its way into Russia’s face and has announced plans to incorporate Ukraine as well, but when Russia reacts, it’s the one doing the provoking.

Clinton’s neoconservative interpretation of what’s happening in Eastern Europe is so upside-down and inside-out that it could ultimately become the flashpoint for a nuclear war between Russia and the West.

While she sees Russia as the “aggressor” against NATO, the Russians see NATO moving troops up to its borders and watch the deployment of anti-ballistic-missile systems in Romania and Poland, thus making a first-strike nuclear attack against Russia more feasible. Russia has made clear that it views these military deployments, just kilometers from major Russian cities, as an existential threat.

In response, Russia is raising its alert levels and upgrading its strategic forces. Yet, Hillary Clinton believes the Russians have no reason to fear NATO’s military encirclement and no right to resist U.S.-supported coups in countries on Russia’s periphery. It is just such a contradiction of viewpoints that can turn a spark into an uncontrollable inferno.

What might happen, for instance, if Ukraine’s nationalist — and even neo-Nazi — militias, which wield increasing power over the corrupt and indecisive regime in Kiev, received modern weaponry from a tough-talking Clinton-45 administration and launched an offensive to exterminate ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine and to reclaim Crimea, where 96 percent of the voters opted to secede from Ukraine and rejoin Russia?

A President Hillary Clinton would have talked herself into a position of supporting this “liberation” of “Russian-occupied territory” and her clever propagandists would surely present this “heroic struggle” as a war of good against evil, much as they justified bloody U.S. invasions of Iraq and Libya which Clinton supported as U.S. senator and Secretary of State, respectively.

What if the Ukrainian forces then fired missiles striking Russia’s naval base at Sevastopol in Crimea, killing some of the 20,000 Russian troops stationed there and inflicting damage on Russia’s Black Sea fleet? What if Kremlin hardliners finally got their way and unleashed the Russian army to launch a real invasion of Ukraine, crushing its military, rumbling through to Kiev and accomplishing their own “regime change”?

Given what we know about Clinton’s tough-talking persona, the odds are good that she would opt for an escalation – and that could set the stage for nuclear war, possibly starting because the Russians would fear the imminence of a NATO first strike, made more possible by those ABM bases in Romania and Poland.How would President Hillary Clinton respond? Would she put herself in the shoes of Russia’s leaders and search for some way to de-escalate or would she get high-and-mighty and escalate the crisis by activating NATO military forces to counter this “Russian aggression”?

Clinton’s Non-Nuclear Wars

There are other areas in the world where a President Hillary Clinton would likely go to war albeit at a sub-nuclear level. During the campaign, she has made clear that she intends to invade Syria once she takes office, although she frames her invasions as humanitarian gestures, such as creating “safe zones” and “no-fly zones.”

In other words, although she condemns Russian “aggression,” she advocates aggressive war herself, seemingly incapable of recognizing her hypocrisies and only grudgingly acknowledging her “mistakes,” such as her support for the invasion of Iraq.

So, on Thursday, even as she made strong points about Trump’s mismatched temperament for becoming Commander-in-Chief, she flashed a harsh temperament of her own that also was unsettling, although in a different way.

Trump shoots from the lip and has a thin skin, while Clinton is tightly wound and also has a thin skin. Trump lets his emotions run wild while Clinton is excessively controlled. Trump engages in raucous give-and-take with his critics; Clinton tries to hide her decision-making (and emails) from her critics.

Clinton sprinkled her speech denouncing Trump with gratuitous insults aimed at Putin and undiplomatic slaps at Russia, such as, “If Donald gets his way, they’ll be celebrating in the Kremlin. We cannot let that happen.”It’s hard to say which set of behaviors is more dangerous. One can imagine Trump having free-form or chaotic diplomatic encounters with allies and adversaries alike, while Clinton would plot and scheme, insisting on cooperation from allies and demanding capitulation from adversaries.

In short, there is reason to fear the election of either of these candidates, one because of his unpredictability and the other because of her rigidity. How, one might wonder, did the two major political parties reach this juncture, putting two arguably unfit personalities within reach of the nuclear codes?

Kiryas Joel is a Hasidic enclave within Monroe, NY with its own schools, emergency medical and other governmental services. A recent book by Louis Grumet with John Caher, “The Curious Case of Kiryas Joel: The Rise of a Village Theocracy and the Battle to Defend the Separation of Church and State” (Chicago Review Press, $27.99), details the machinations behind the extraordinary carve out of a school district for a religious group.

Monroe contains incorporated and unincorporated land. Hasidic Jews have bought land and settled in the unincorporated part of Monroe, and since 2013, they have been fighting to join the rest of Monroe and become a part of the Kiryas Joel school district.

The issue is complicated. The Hasidim claim that opposition to incorporation is anti Semitic. If the new land is incorporated, Hasidim will form a majority in the town. If they follow the pattern they have in neighboring Monsey, Hasidim will dominate the school board and attempt to cut funds to public schools and advantage religious schools. A 2013 report by a state appointed monitor found that East Rampopo (the school district for Monsey) cut services to public schools while increasing public money spent on religious schools. On March 16, 2016, FBI agents raided schools and computer stores in Monsey, with a warrant that alleged that the Monsey had used federal educational technology funds (designated for public schools) to buy technology for yeshivas. As of yet, no charges have been filed.

But the problems in Kiryas Joel go beyond disdain for state and federal law and the rights of their neighbors. In May 2016 a video that appears to show a rabbi sexually abusing a young boy was posted on facebook and quickly went viral. The rabbi is the principal of the school. Did the community rise up and demand that the principal resign? Hardly. On May 12, the FBI raided the school and removed a number of computers. The rabbi has yet to be charged.

This incident follows one a few months ago in which a similar video was leaked to police, an investigation by state authorities was launched and no charges were filed.

The now largely irrelevant New York Times wrote of the most recent video as an intrusion into a religious community that policed itself, and characterized the video as inconclusive. The Times apparently did not consider the fraud of federal funds in Monsey to be newsworthy at all.

New York state law does not defer to a community to ‘police itself’ when a crime occurs. If the principal abused the boy (and the tape certainly looks like nothing else) he may or may not be liable to his religious community, but he is liable to the state of New York that has a responsibility and an obligation to protect its citizens. An abused child who is part of an insular yet powerful religious community would seem to be a prototypical powerless individual whom the state must protect.

It is hard to imagine a different example of an elementary school principal caught on video abusing a child and not facing immediate arraignment and parental protest. I know of no reason to afford Hasidic Jews any special deference within our legal system. There is no excuse for journalists from ‘the paper of record’ to follow a hands off policy where religious communities are concerned.

On Friday [May 27th] in Athens there was the cross-hairs statement. By the month of October, the month before the US presidential election, there will be the trigger point.

The US and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies are going to war with Russia, accelerating the inevitability that Russia will strike in self-defence. This is what the first and second statements by President Vladimir Putin warn. There will be no statement of warning.

News media in the West treat any such report — that Russia might be placed into a situation in which a blitz nuclear attack against the West would (and maybe even will) be Russia’s rational response to Western operations to surround Russia with hostile forces on its borders — as if there’s something kooky about any such opinion: they treat it as if the West weren’t ruled by people who are that evil, as if recognizing such evil in a ruler in the West is to be prohibited (especially if that ruler is America’s President, instead of, for example, Turkey’s President, whom apparently one is allowed to impute to be evil). On the present occasion, however, they should pay close attention to the situation Helmer describes, and they should report about the matter, while there might still be time enough to avert an unimaginable catastrophe, which (as Helmer explains in detail) could quite possibly happen this year.

The West is in stark reality-denial. Whereas the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, between JFK and Khrushchev, was accompanied by an appropriate public fear on both sides, theeven more dangerous situation this time, between Putin and Obama, elicits such fearonly among the Russian people, not at all among Americans and other Westerners.

Mutually Assured Destruction, or M.A.D., isn’t only a reality in a nuclearly armed multipolar world, but it is also, and equally importantly, also a mass-psychology, of belief that there cannot be any winner of a nuclear war — that (especially regarding a nuclear conflict between the two nuclear superpowers) any nuclear war will destroy the planet we all share. This sense of a shared fate on both sides, is central to M.A.D., as what itwas — the foundation-stone of the post-world-war era, the era in which existed the longest extended period without a global war, since the advent of global war in 1914.

That era is, tragically, now over.

M.A.D. ended as a mass-psychology in the West, but not in the East — not in Russia, and not in any other of the world’s free nations, otherwise known as the independentnations (the nations that aren’tunder the control of the U.S. aristocracy and of any of the aristocracies that are allied to that aristocracy — nor of any other foreign nation’s aristocracy), or also called the “BRICS” nations (which just recently lost its “B” when Brazil underwent a coup, which changed Brazil to becoming now a satellite of the U.S., which will probably (if nuclear war is averted) then be ‘rescued’ by IMF loans that will increasingly strip the Brazilian public and leave them with even lower living-standards and even deeper indebtedness, which will increasingly be owed to foreign lenders).

M.A.D. resulted from the balance that existed when America’s NATO alliance was counterbalanced by the USSR’s Warsaw Pact alliance. Therefore, the very idea of nuclear ‘conquest’, in a military sense, was simply assumed to be impractical, not only by the publics on both sides, but (at least as crucially) by the two opposed aristocracies, West versus East, U.S.-allied versus U.S.S.R.-allied.

Thus, in the West, there is no hysteria, such as once existed, for everyone to build his/her own family bomb-shelter, even as the West now is tightening its nuclear noose around the Russians’ collective neck. Instead, that previous fear and sometimes even hysteria, has been replaced by a situation in which only some individuals (no one knows whom nor how many) from the West’s aristocracies, have purchased elaborate hardened underground luxurious bunkers, in preparation for their increasingly likely future existences in a presumed post nuclear-holocaust world, and meanwhile the Westernmasses are not at all outraged at their being left fully exposed with no bunkers at all; and, the reason they’re not, is that they believe that, as their country becomes ‘protected’ by a ballistic-missile-‘defense’ or BMD or ABM (anti-ballistic-missile) system against the ‘enemy’ (now just Russia), they’ve got no more need to worry about ’the enemy’.

The Reagan-era ‘Star Wars’ anti-ballistic missile defense dream for the American aristocracy, is now starting to be realized finally in an Obama-era Lockheed Martin “Aegis Ashore Missile Defense System” nightmare for the Russian people alone, as the putative imagined pathway towards global victory for America’s aristocracy is becoming installed in eastern Europe and other areas bordering on and close to Russia. The American and other Western publics are blithely unworried about it, because the aristocracy’s ‘news’ media have told them that this is ‘just a defensive measure against possible further Russian aggression’ (not a reach-for-global-conquest by America’s aristocracy, which it actuallyis).

This is one of the reasons why, from the standpoint of America’s rulers, it’s so vitally important for information about those luxurious bunkers to be circulated only in publications for the elite, such asFORBES. If the general public were to become increasingly aware that the few billionaires amongst them are making their own preparations for living in a possible post-nuclear-holocaust nation, then the uncomfortable questions would arise as to why the federal government is not assisting the general public to do likewise (or at least to live in some kind of bunker, such as didhappen back in ‘the good old days’).

This is also the result of the ‘libertarian’ or ‘neoliberal’ ideology, the ideology of ‘individualism’, which the aristocracy has systematically inculcated now into generations of people in the West, which denigrates the government’s obligations to the public, and which raises instead to the ideal, the belief in the rightness of ‘every man for himself’ and ‘we are not in this together’, because ‘the masses of lazy bums and stupid people should get nothing more than whatever they deserve’. If, perhaps, a billionaire can afford to live ‘safely’ deep underground, then “more power to him,” according to this ideology, which proclaims that equality of rights is wrong, and that instead a person deserves to have no more rights than he or she has property, wealth, dollars — things to trade with other individuals who possess wealth. In the U.S., this transactional basis for individuals’ rights was the ideology of the Supreme Court in a series of decisions such as the 2010 Citizens United decision, that a person’s right to ‘free speech’ should beproportional to how much money he/she spends to buy it so as to persuade others to vote the way one wants them to vote, or to buy whatever else one wants them to buy.

This transactional concept of an individual’s rights is a protection of dollars, not really of people. It’s for (and in service to) an aristocracy, not a democracy. This Supreme Court has supported aristocracy, not democracy. And, since, after WW II, this has increasingly become the new ethos, not only in the United States but in all countries that take the U.S. to be the ideal, Western publics are not at all outraged at being left high-and-dry in the event that perhaps the new military-security system, which is replacing the shared safety of M.A.D., is replacing it with the competitive and non-shared safety of ’nuclear primacy’, and will end up leaving the public out in the cold nuclear winter in the enemy’s camp.

After all, in the totally competitive world, what’s won is taken, and what’s lost is given; and, ‘to the victor belong the spoils’. This might not necessarily be so in economics, but it certainly is so in the military; it even defines the military outlook — which, after all, is what we’re talking about here.

And, if people have to pay for their rights, then the ‘enemy’ isn’t the aristocracy — certainly not that of one’s own nation — but instead, it is the people who don’t have the money to buy their own rights. Some people call this type of political system ‘liberty’ or ‘libertarianism’ or ‘liberalism’ or ‘neoliberalism’; but, by whatever name it is called, it certainly isn’t democracy, and it certainly isn’t equality of rights, and it certainly isn’tequality of opportunity. It is, in a word: fascism. That’s an extension of the military outlook, into everything.

But another accurate term for it is: madness. However, it is a madness that has been sold, by Western aristocracies, to the publics in the West, which is the reason why the belief in M.A.D. is now gone from the West. The popular belief there now is: eat or else be eaten. And, what is to be eaten isn’t the aristocrats who are selling this poison; it’s ‘the enemy’. (Meanwhile, America and NATO can call thugs like this ‘friends’ and even “members of NATO” and still call themselves supporters of ‘democracy’, a term that’s now devoid of meaning in the West.) This is why Western publics don’t care about the fear that the Russian people feel concerning the installation of America’s anti-ballistic missile systems.

In the most fundamental sense, the concept that we are all in this together is gone, in the West. If it doesn’t exist in both the West and the ‘East’ (namely, in Russia, where itdoes exist), then a nuclear war is extremely likely, and the real question is: When will it be likeliest to happen?

Germany says it is too early to discuss lifting the European Union’s economic sanctions against Russia over Moscow’s alleged interference in the Ukraine crisis.

“I think the discussion about lifting of sanctions has come far too early. We are not anywhere close to having Minsk implemented,” said Christoph Heusgen, a foreign policy adviser to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, on Thursday.

Heusgen added it was difficult to imagine the sanctions would not be extended for another half year given the ongoing fighting in eastern Ukraine.

The EU imposed a series of sanctions on Russia in 2014 over allegations that Moscow played a role in the separation of the Crimea peninsula from Ukraine and its reunification with Russia, which took place through a local referendum.

However, Moscow has repeatedly rejected the claims.

The remarks came as a number of EU states have suggested easing anti-Russia sanctions, which will expire in July, in order to defuse tension with Moscow even though a peace deal struck at Minsk early last year has not ended the conflict in eastern Ukraine.

The EU members will decide about extending the bans against Moscow during a summit later this month. Any decision for the roll-over of sanctions needs unanimity.

EU Ambassador to Russia Vygaudas Usackas said also on Thursday that the 28-nation bloc will lift the sanctions “entirely” when the Minsk agreements are fulfilled.

Meanwhile, Kremlin has been engaged in diplomatic efforts over the past few weeks to influence the EU decision and relax the restrictions on its economy.

Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin traveled to Greece, one of the supporters of lifting sanctions.

The visit came days after Moscow freed Ukrainian pilot Nadiya Savchenko in a prisoner swap that is viewed as a measure to ease diplomatic tension between the two countries.

Differences remain within the EU over the issue of extending sanctions. France and Germany, the former staunch supporters of the sanctions, are calling for a rethink of the decision.

Germany is reportedly considering options such as removing restrictions on Russian lawmakers’ travel, reducing the period of sanctions from six months to three or even easing sanctions in return for Moscow’s support for holding elections in Ukraine’s troubled east.

Earlier this week, German businesses signed deals with Russia’s Kaluga and Kaliningrad 600 million in Munich to invest in farm equipment production in Russia.

Since 2007, German companies have invested some €2 billion in production facilities of Kaluga, said Kaluga governor Anatoly Artamonov during a visit to Germany.